In the News (Tue 3 Mar 15)

Missouri would be allowed to enter the federal Union as a slave state, Maine (a territory that prohibited slavery) would be admitted as a free state, and slavery would be allowed elsewhere in the former Louisiana Territory below Missouri’ssouthern boundary, latitude 36°30’N. This was the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

Missouri was admitted to the Union as the 24th state on August 10, 1821, by proclamation of President James Monroe, after the legislature passed a declaration that the provision barring free fls would never be enforced.

Secession was caused by the coexistence of a slave-owning South and an increasingly anti-slavery North.

The tariff was rarely mentioned in the heated debates of 1860-61 over secession, although Robert Toombs of Georgia did denounce "the infamous Morrill bill" as where "the robber and the incendiary struck hands, and united in joint raid against the South."[3] The tariff also appeared in two secession documents of the states.

Southernsecession was triggered by the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln because regional leaders feared that he would make good on his promise to stop the expansion of slavery and would thus put it on a course toward extinction.

At the state's secession convention in March 1861, none of the 99 elected delegates was publicly in favor of separating from the Union.

While Missouri's identity was Western before the war, by war's end and afterwards, much of its populace had adopted a southern identity, fed by anti-federalist sentiments that began to arise even before the Civil War.

Missouri's growing southern identity received further nourishment from federal occupation of its neutral state early in the Civil War.

The border States of Missouri and Maryland moved during the course of the war to end slavery, and in December 1864, the Congress proposed the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, barring slavery throughout the United States; the 13th Amendment was fully ratified by the end of 1865.

THE general assembly of Missouri met at Jefferson City on the 2d of January, 1861, and the Southern element organized both houses with scarcely a show of opposition.

In his address Governor Jackson traced the origin and growth of the anti-slavery party, and showed that it was in violation of the letter and spirit of the Constitution, sectional, inimical to the rights and interests of the State, and a menace to the perpetuity of the Union.

In Missouri there were two arsenals--one at Liberty, in Clay county, on the western border of the State, and the other in the southern suburb of St. Louis.

The Missouri Compromise, also called the Compromise of 1820, was an agreement passed in 1820 between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States, involving primarily the regulation of slavery in the western territories.

Before the bill was returned to the House, a second amendment was adopted on the motion of Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois, excluding slavery from the Missouri Territory north of latitude 36°30' (the southern boundary of Missouri), except within the limits of the proposed state of Missouri.

The provisions of the Missouri compromise forbidding slavery on the territory of the Louisiana purchase north of the 36°30' line were effectively repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

James Peckham was a member of the Missouri Legislature when George G. Vest introduced a resolution in the house in the nature of a reply to resolutions adopted by the legislatures of New York and other Northern States tendering men and money to the President for the purpose of coercing the seceding States.

Missouri wound up with two state governments in 1861 - an elected pro-slavery state government (Governor Jackson) which seceded from the Union, and a pro-slavery government (Governor Humble) which was imposed on the state by the Federal Government under martial law.

On Lyon's refusal to accede to the Secessionists' proposal that the state should be neutral, hostilities opened in earnest, and Lyon, having cleared Missouri of small hostile bands in the central part of the state, turned to the southern districts, where a Confederate army was advancing from the Arkansas border.

Missouri and Kentucky remained in the Union, but in both, factions organized "secessions", which were recognized by the Confederate States of America.

In Missouri, the State government under Governor Claiborne F. Jackson, a southern sympathizer, evacuated the state capital of Jefferson City when it was attacked by northern Gen. Nathaniel Lyon on June 14, 1861.

The elected Missouri government, under Jackson, met in-exile at the town of Neosho, Missouri and adopted a secession ordinance that was recognized by the Confederacy on October 30, 1861 (see the Missourisecession controversy).

That the Missouri Compromise could be applied to new territories for the sake of harmony and preservation of the Union, but in the event of passage of any act in conflict with the above principles, Missouri would cooperate with slaveholding states in measures necessary for mutual protection against northern fanaticism.

Missouri's United States Senators were instructed to act in conformity with the terms of the resolutions.

Missouri's"secession" by the rump legislature was accepted by the Confederate Government and Jackson served as governor of Missouri's government in exile until his death in 1862.

www.kansasboguslegislature.org /mo/jackson_c_f.html (661 words)

The Missouri Compromise(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-02)

The institution of slavery had been a divisive issue in the United States for decades before the territory of Missouri petitioned Congress for admission to the Union as a state in 1818.

Both states were admitted, a free Maine and a slave Missouri, and the balance of power in Congress was maintained as before, postponing the inevitable showdown for another generation.

In an attempt to address the issue of the further spread of slavery, however, the Missouri Compromise stipulated that all the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri, except Missouri, would be free, and the territory below that line would be slave.

The Secession Convention in Louisiana, in session since January 23, 1861, approves an ordinance of secession (by a vote of 113-17), becoming the sixth state to secede.

On March 21 the Missouri State Convention adjourns after voting against Secession, stating "no adequate cause [existed] to impel Missouri to dissolve her connections with the Federal Union." The final vote was 98-1.

With the adoption of Virginia's Ordinance of Secession on May 23, the Second Wheeling Convention began on June 11 as decided at the First Convention in May. The first measures adopted at the Convention ruled that 88 delegates representing 32 counties were entitled to seats in the convention, though other delegates would be accepted later.

Missouri Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, who favored the southern cause, realized that the key to keeping his state neutral or causing it to secede from the Union lay within the walls of the U.S. Arsenal in St. Louis.

Missouri Senator Frank P. Blair, however, along with many pro-Union citizens of St. Louis, was not willing to allow this prize to fall into Governor Jackson's hands.

On April 23rd Governor Jackson ordered the pro-secession Missouri Militia to establish a camp "to attain a greater degree of efficiency and perfection in organization and discipline." In response Gen. Frost ordered the militia of the 1st Military District into a week of training.

Lesson One—An Early Threat of Secession: The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Nullification Crisis.

An Early Threat of Secession: The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Nullification Crisis

In addition to Maine's admission in 1820 as a free state and Missouri's eventual admission as a slave state (in 1821), Illinois Senator Jesse B. Thomas suggested that in the balance of the Louisiana Territory north of the 36º30' parallel (which ran along Missouri'ssouthern border) slavery would be prohibited forever.

Tucker is an endlessly fascinating topic, the hottest "fire-eater" in Missouri and a man who appears to have had his thumb in every secret scheme and society that the Missouri Confederates ever cooked up.

A footnote in Christopher Phillips’ Missouri’s Confederate seems to suggest that this letter may have been a fake, possibly planted by the Unionists to be found during their search and used against both Tucker and Jackson.

Missouri can never be free by her own unaided efforts.

www.civilwarstlouis.com /History2/jwtucker.htm (979 words)

[No title](Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-02)

But what is more important were the pre-war, political conditions and the dynamic figures inside of Missouri that created an immense cleavage between the pro-Union and pro-Southern camps, which marginalized the voices of those who favored a peaceful solution to the crisis gripping the state and the nation.

This meeting would prove to be the watershed event in Missouri'ssecession crisis with Lyon fervantly retorting to Jackson that rather than concede to Jackson, he would rather see "every man, woman, and child in the state dead and buried.

Jackson and his pro-secession followers were exiled to the southwestern corner of the state and would never again bring Missouri to the brink of disunion as they did during the late months of 1860 and the first quarter of 1861.

Lyon boldly attacked the Missouri State Guard that had been joined by a larger Confederate force, and even though he lost the battle and his life, he succeeded in keeping the state under Union control.

Although Missouri remained under Union control for the rest of the war, it provided troops to both sides, pitting neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, and father against son.

Divided into three distinct geographic regions by the Tennessee River, the citizens of the volunteer state were not united on the issues of slavery, secession, or civil war.

www.cr.nps.gov /delta/civil_war/summary.htm (2805 words)

The Museum Gazette(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-02)

General Lyon led his army up the Missouri River to take the state capitol, Jefferson City, and forced the governor and the legislature to flee the state.

The incident pushed many of Missouri's young men, who were generally neutral on the issues of the war, into the ranks of the pro-southern Missouri State Guard.

Missouri went on to suffer four long years of bloodshed, trailing only Virginia and Tennessee in the number of battles and skirmishes fought on her soil.

The secession movement in Northern Missouri and along the line of the Hannibal and Saint Joseph Railroad is scarcely stronger in any Southern State.

Quincy, in Illinois, which from the course of the Mississippi River projects into the Missouri at a distance of sixty-five miles west of Saint Louis, presents immense advantages as a military post, and as such should be occupied by the Government.

Missouri once against the Federal Government, the only present feasible and expeditious road by which troops, munitions, provisions, transportation, and general travel can pass is the Hannibal and Saint Joseph Railroad, over Northern Missouri, between those Western sections and the country east of the Mississippi River.

home.earthlink.net /~turnerbrigade/wdrfann5.htm (638 words)

Ordinances of Secession(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-02)

The ordinances of secession were the actual legal language by which the seceded states severed their connection with the Federal Union.

The Missourisecession ordinance was passed by a rump legislature and never approved by the people at large.

The Kentuckysecession ordinance was adopted by a convention of 200 participants representing 65 counties, held in Russellville.

The Missouri legislature was not in Jeff City when the Yankees came to town to arrest them like they did in Maryland.

One of the Missouri legislatures even had something (in his diary) about they had to wait for the vote until more members showed up for it, and they eventually showed and voted for secession.

Note: This Ordinance of Secession was enacted by the legally elected representatives of the State of Missouri, not the illegal, unconstitutional, non-elected, puppet government that Lincoln had installed.

Nathaniel Lyon (July 14, 1818 - August 10, 1861) was the first Union general to be killed in the American Civil War and is noted for his action in the state of Missouri at the beginning of the conflict.

Some credit his quick action and hard line unionism for stopping the Missourisecession movement while others question his influence peddling and his role in events such as the St. Louis Massacre, which inflamed many Missourians on the secession issue.

At the time the state of Missouri was relatively neutral in the dispute between North and South, but Governor Claiborne F. Jackson was a strong Southern sympathizer.

Morin was "stern and imperative" and "born to command and lead." He was born in Bourbon county, Kentucky, resided for a while in the Boon's Lick in Howard county, and pioneered in the Platte Purchase with a large colony of settlers in 1837.

He began farming and was elected in 1838 to the Missouri General Assembly along with David Atchison, pledged to support organization of one or more counties from the Purchase area.

The Missouri volunteers "could do nothing well except march and fight." Frontiersmen to the bone, they would not accept direction or command, questioned their non-coms and derided their officers.

Situated near the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers, it was the natural distributing point of the South, the South West, the West and the North West, as far as the Missouri river extended.

The rebel Governor of Missouri, Claiborn Fox Jackson, refused to comply with the requisition of the War Department in an insolent message, and as Commander-in-Chief of the Missouri Militia, ordered the Volunteer Militia to assemble in a camp of instruction, near the city of St. Louis, on Monday, May 6, 1861.

The guns, the 1st Missouri infantry, Colonel Blair, the 2nd Missouri Infantry, Colonel Boernstein and the Homeguards, the 3rd Missouri and the 4th Missouri, Colonel Nic.